The People between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a Bronze Drum Culture, 200-750 CE

by Catherine Churchman

Overview

This fundamental study provides the first comprehensive history in any language of the lands between the Red and Pearl Rivers in southern China and the people who resided there over a span of a thousand years. Bringing to life the mysterious early people known as Li and Lao who inhabited the area, Catherine Churchman explores their custom of casting large bronze kettledrums. As the symbols of political authority and legitimacy for the Li and Lao rulers, the abundance of drums found in the archaeological record is an indication not only of the great number of such rulers, but also of their great wealth and power, which increased significantly from the third century CE even as the Chinese Empires tightened their control over surrounding districts. Drawing on a combination of Classical Chinese sources and scholarship in archaeology, anthropology, and historical linguistics, the author explains the political and economic factors behind the rise to power and subsequent disappearance of the indigenous leadership and its drum culture. She fills significant gaps in our understanding of the early interactions between China and northern Southeast Asia, challenging many widely held assumptions about the history of Chinese settlement and ethnic relations in the region, including those concerning the relationship between the Chinese Empires and the lands that would form the heart of a future Vietnamese state. A crucial work for understanding historical developments in the highland regions south of the Yangtze valley, it examines the first steps in the Sinic penetration of this highland world, one that has continued to the present. Bringing unprecedented attention to the historical identity of a previously overlooked region and a people, this book creates a new category in East Asian history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442258600
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	09/14/2016
Series:	Asia/Pacific/Perspectives
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Catherine Churchman is a lecturer in the Asian Studies Programme in the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University, Wellington.

Table of Contents

List of Maps and Tables
Acknowledgements
Note on Transcription and Referencing Systems
Table of Chinese Dynasties
Introduction
Chapter One: Digging up Drums
Chapter Two: The Two Rivers and the Lands Between—a Geographical Outline
Chapter Three: Why are the Li and Lao?—The shifting meanings of Ethnonyms
Chapter Four: ‘Masters of their Small Domains’—Local and Imported Traditions of Leadership
Chapter Five: ‘To Overawe the Li and Lao’—Attempts at Military Conquest
Chapter Six: Gold, Silver, Snakes and Slaves: Highland-Lowland Trade Relations
Chapter Seven: ‘Last of the Bronze Drum Chiefs’—The Rise and Fall of the Great Families
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

This is a consummate treatise on the history of the peoples who lived in the region between the Red River and Pearl River during the period from roughly the third through the eighth century. Utilizing materials from a wide variety of disciplines—archaeology, metallurgy, coinage, linguistics, botany, zoology, medicine, and so forth—Catherine Churchman skillfully navigates between the conflicting claims of modern nationalists to show that the indigenes of that time and place viewed themselves as neither Vietnamese nor Chinese. In light of the heavy investment of modern scholarship in projecting contemporary political boundaries and ideologies backward to earlier times, this is a major, salutary achievement.

Victor H. Mair

A masterpiece of synthesis and insight that provides a lucid overarching framework for several centuries of regional history as well as nuanced discussions of countless ground-level issues, from problematizing the concepts of ‘Sinicization’ and ‘ethnicity’ to mapping out trade patterns between the Red River Plain and southern China.

Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog

[An] extraordinary piece of work.. .. The People Between the Rivers is a recommended read not only for specialists on the history of this particular region, but also for any historian looking for outstanding examples of how to apply a strict methodology to elaborate plausible hypotheses, in contexts where data is scarce. In spite of the inevitable limitations caused by this problem, Churchman is able to, quoting a Vietnamese historian, put ‘'flesh” on the mute archaeological “bones”’ (p. 36), demonstrating along the way that it is possible to say much more about the Li and Lao than what is contained in histories determined by nation-building interests. Her work is bound to become a reference for future studies on the region of the Two Rivers; and hopefully it will also spark similar interest within the present-day nation states whose lands the Li and Lao inhabited more than a thousand years ago.

New Books Asia

A remarkable and path-breaking contribution to both East and Southeast Asian historical studies. Eschewing the restraints of nation-state histories, the author weaves a political and social account of the lands and peoples located between what are today the Red River and Pearl River systems. Employing the bronze drum as a cultural and social marker, Churchman exercises an extensive range of disciplines extending from linguistics to archaeology, and critical textual studies to political history to describe this region over much of the first millennium of the Common Era. Thereby, societies and polities which other traditions and histories depict as peripheries are assigned an unprecedented and illuminating centrality.

Geoffrey Wade

Catherine Churchman has given us a marvelous reinterpretation of the bronze drums and their political significance as she shows us the complexities of southern Chinese frontier history during the first millennium CE. Using both original Chinese texts and archaeological sources, her work opens up for us the true nature of the mountain region lying between China and Southeast Asia and of the interactions between indigenous and Han peoples. It is important for understanding this region’s history within a broader context over the past two millennia.

John K. Whitmore

This book admirably collates the existing documentation on and puts in context an obscure period in the history of south China. By setting Chinese records in the background of south-eastern Asian society and the distribution of bronze drums, it successfully argues that from the first century CE to the seventh century CE, chieftainship evolved from overseeing small local communities to exerting control over regional alliances under the recognition of the Chinese imperial government. In so doing, it reasserts the importance of an understanding of indigenous society, not only in China but in all of history.

David Faure

Churchman provides a careful, compelling, and much-needed account of an oft-neglected region in both Chinese history and recent Vietnamese nationalist history. Churchman criticizes in passing the uneven and negligible treatment of the bronze drum culture in recent Vietnamese historical writing, which undervalues the drum's plain designs for promoting national pride. She mainly challenges the prevailing Sinocentric view in Chinese historiography that the region was politically peripheral and insignificant to the Chinese empires, and that their peoples were uncivilized and nameless ‘southwestern barbarians.’ Instead, Churchman skillfully and justifiably makes the region the center of its own history. Recognizing the difficulty in writing a history for peoples without their own written records, Churchman turns to archaeology and material culture for corroborating evidence, and she detects and exposes political biases and linguistic as well as literary confusions in the Chinese sources. As a result, she convincingly rejects the portrayal of a homogeneous, passive, and eventually Sinicized people subject to the imperial Chinese states and recovers the agency of these bronze drum casting people, who conducted active, strategic, and at times powerful negotiations in their constant political and military dealings with and alongside the Chinese empires in the north.

Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Choice Reviews

A masterful synthesis of information from multiple disciplines that provides a lucid overarching framework for several centuries of regional history and engages in nuanced discussions of countless ground-level issues, from problematizing the concepts of ‘Sinicization’ and ‘ethnicity’ to mapping out trade patterns between the Red River Plain and southern China. It is indeed an invaluable scholarly contribution.

Liam Kelley

The People Between the Rivers is a masterful historical account of an important region, its peoples and chieftains, and the various Chinese administrative empires with which they constantly interacted. It provides a focused, interdisciplinary analysis of cultural interactions involving a neglected group of peoples over a large expanse of time.. .. Churchman also brings broad insights and critical approaches from linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology to bear on the study; the result is nothing short of spectacular. This study provides a crucial missing link in the chain of our understanding of premodern China–Southeast Asia relations.

Asian Perspectives

Churchman provides a careful, compelling, and much-needed account of an oft-neglected region in both Chinese history and recent Vietnamese nationalist history. Churchman criticizes in passing the uneven and negligible treatment of the bronze drum culture in recent Vietnamese historical writing, which undervalues the drum's plain designs for promoting national pride. She mainly challenges the prevailing Sinocentric view in Chinese historiography that the region was politically peripheral and insignificant to the Chinese empires, and that their peoples were uncivilized and nameless ‘southwestern barbarians.’ Instead, Churchman skillfully and justifiably makes the region the center of its own history. Recognizing the difficulty in writing a history for peoples without their own written records, Churchman turns to archaeology and material culture for corroborating evidence, and she detects and exposes political biases and linguistic as well as literary confusions in the Chinese sources. As a result, she convincingly rejects the portrayal of a homogeneous, passive, and eventually Sinicized people subject to the imperial Chinese states and recovers the agency of these bronze drum casting people, who conducted active, strategic, and at times powerful negotiations in their constant political and military dealings with and alongside the Chinese empires in the north. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Choice

Churchman provides a careful, compelling, and much-needed account of an oft-neglected region in both Chinese history and recent Vietnamese nationalist history. Churchman criticizes in passing the uneven and negligible treatment of the bronze drum culture in recent Vietnamese historical writing, which undervalues the drum's plain designs for promoting national pride. She mainly challenges the prevailing Sinocentric view in Chinese historiography that the region was politically peripheral and insignificant to the Chinese empires, and that their peoples were uncivilized and nameless ‘southwestern barbarians.’ Instead, Churchman skillfully and justifiably makes the region the center of its own history. Recognizing the difficulty in writing a history for peoples without their own written records, Churchman turns to archaeology and material culture for corroborating evidence, and she detects and exposes political biases and linguistic as well as literary confusions in the Chinese sources. As a result, she convincingly rejects the portrayal of a homogeneous, passive, and eventually Sinicized people subject to the imperial Chinese states and recovers the agency of these bronze drum casting people, who conducted active, strategic, and at times powerful negotiations in their constant political and military dealings with and alongside the Chinese empires in the north.

Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

CHOICE